This story starts in the back of a New York taxicab. On a snowy January day in 1998, A.C. Thompson hailed a cab as he left his Manhattan apartment building. He ended up sharing the ride to the airport with Nashville lawyer Richard Busch. It was Busch’s last day in the Big Apple after a five-year legal battle on behalf of the Tribune Company, a one-time owner of New York Daily News, against 600 workers, their unions and a doctor who had made fraudulent hearing loss claims against the newspaper. Representing the Tribune, Busch countered with civil racketeering charges against the unions, emerging victorious in 1998.

In the conversation that ensued, Thompson found out Busch’s occupation and home town. He mentioned that his wife worked for a record company with interests in Nashville. This coincidence spurred further discussion and would prove prologue to a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that has left scores of music industry executives scratching their heads, and, perhaps, re-evaluating the strength of their legal departments. While Busch had been wrapping up his legal victory, little-known Michigan company Bridgeport Music had been striving without success to get giants like Universal Music and BMG to pay licensing fees for the use of music it owned. Bridgeport’s owner Armen Boladian had signed George Clinton and his Funkadelic band to his label in 1969. Boladian loaned Clinton money in exchange for the rights to many of his musical compositions and original recordings in the 1970s.

When the catalog of Clinton’s music became popular fodder for rap albums of the early 1990s, Clinton sued Bridgeport to regain publishing rights, but to no avail.

A Florida court held that Bridgeport was the rightful owner of Clinton’s work.

During the 1990s, it became apparent to Boladian that Clinton’s riffs, such as the two-second ditty in Funkadelic’s “Get off Your Ass and Jam,” were constantly being looped—the repeating of a riff many times over in the course of a song, sometimes lowered in pitch—into new material.

The newfound popularity of Clinton’s work was helping other artists make music and money, and Bridgeport contended it had a right to some of the money going into the coffers of other music companies. In 2001, after having met with Boladian and Jane Peterer, Thompson’s wife and Boladian’s second-in-command, Busch filed a massive 900-page complaint in Nashville Federal Court on Bridgeport’s behalf against 800 defendants.

“We wanted to have the lawsuit filed in Tennessee,” Peterer recalls. Busch’s geographic location was not the only factor in getting the job. In fact, his résumé was so impressive that Bridge- port dropped Barry Richard—a highly respected attorney from the New York law firm of Greenberg Traurig who represented President George W. Bush in the 2000 election recount in Florida—as its counsel.

Busch’s approach to the Bridgeport case was as bold as it was economical. Prior to his 2001 complaint, nobody had dared to go after so many defendants in copyright litigation and yet pay just one filing fee.

Though Busch himself understandably declines comment on the not-yet-fully-resolved case, transcripts and the comments of others reveal how the litigation tested the determination and stamina of those involved. Discovery and preparation took months—nothing new to Busch, who says he did two depositions a day, four days a week for three years during the Tribune litigation in New York.

The case got off to a rough start for Busch and Bridgeport. Nashville district court Judge Thomas Higgins viewed the 900-page complaint and countless motions with some skepticism. He quipped on the difficulty of Bridgeport disputes in a hearing on Oct. 1, 2002. “Nothing is going to be decided on the basis of who files the most paper.”

According to transcripts, Higgins tried to convince Busch to settle early, but Busch would not waiver. When Higgins expressed his amazement at this strategy and lack of willingness to entertain settlement offers, D’Lesli Davis, Busch’s colleague in Bridgeport litigation at the time, responded: “I have heard over and over and over again from our clients. It is their position that these songs have been stolen from them. It is their position that this money has been owed for years. They have no incentive to settle piecemeal and give the defendants a longer period of time to continue to exploit their property without compensation.”

More damaging to Bridgeport’s case, Judge Higgins found little similarity between Funkadelic’s 1975 version of “Get Off” and the song “100 Miles and Running” by the rap group NWA. The latter song had been featured in the 1998 movie I Got the Hook Up by Dimension Films and No Limit Films. After Bridgeport settled with Dimension on the alleged infringement of the musical compositions, Judge Higgins dismissed the only remaining claim for unauthorized use of the sound recording “Get Off” in “100 Miles” and the movie soundtrack. Upon some deliberation, Higgins observed that a de minimis defense applies in this case. A de minimis analysis is a derivative of one of the most common tests for substantial similarity, which looks at whether an average lay observer would recognize the alleged copy as having been appropriated from the copyrighted work. In short, Higgins found that the copied segment of “Get Off” was “not even recognizable to a lay observer as being appropriated from the plaintiff’s work.”

Undeterred, Busch appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Busch and Davis, understandably, met constant opposition from the top legal minds employed by Nashville’s Music Row, as well as from those in New York and Los Angeles. “There was not much friendly chit-chat,” Davis recalls, “but a lot of withholding of evidence and motions to compel. It was a slam-bam struggle every step of the way.” In September 2004, three years and thousands of pages of legal briefs after the initial filing, a panel of three judges on the Sixth Circuit, acknowledging no precedent for its decision, said that there is no distinction between copying a whole song or just a tiny portion thereof. In other words, “if you lift just two seconds of a song, stealing means stealing,” says King & Ballow co-founder Bob Ballow, who hired Busch 14 years ago as a labor/employment litigator in his union-busting practice.

Busch’s victory in Bridgeport v. Dimension Films and No Limit Films has shaken the foundations of copyright litigation. Nashville attorney Bob Sullivan, who represents No Limit Films against Busch, wrote this past June that the Sixth Circuit’s opinion is “based upon a misreading of applicable law and … has broad effects throughout the music industry.” A Washington, D.C., lawyer, Peter Gutmann, opined recently in The American Lawyer that “the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit announced a simple test for infringement that takes into account contemporary digital technology. Yet its test elevates abstract analysis above common sense, ignores the nature of the artistic process, and leaves the underlying problem as unresolved as ever.” Still, Gutmann added: “The court fashioned a new and disarmingly simple bright-line rule: ‘Get a license or do not sample.’”

The philosophical question of “How many notes do a protected song make?” aside, Busch deserves kudos for his bold vision in defending Bridgeport’s interests. “It was a huge vindication for Bridgeport,” says Davis, who joined Dallas law firm Fulbright & Jaworski in 2004. “After all those defeats, Bridgeport prevailed and established a precedent. It was a pretty big sledgehammer to wield at defendants.” New sledgehammer in hand, Bridgeport is likely to settle the remaining 80 cases on more favorable terms.

Though the battle is won, some skirmishes remain. Universal Music, represented in Nashville by Phil Kirkpatrick of Stewart, Estes & Donnell, is haggling over some $110,000 in attorney’s fees that the court said is due Universal. Bridgeport is appealing.

And then there’s P. Diddy. This coming spring, if things proceed as scheduled, Busch will face the lawyers representing the rapper/mogul. It would be the first actual trial to result from Busch’s Bridgeport broadside.

One Music Row attorney sees this as evidence that Busch has used the voluntary dismissal route much too often, clogging up the court system. Busch counters that less than 15% of the initial 500 cases were dismissed; the rest of them either settled or are in the process of settling.

In another display of lawyerly stamina, Busch recently filed a separate lawsuit on Bridgeport’s behalf against Universal, Napster, Apple Computer and Yahoo. That complaint alleges that the defendants put up Bridgeport’s music for digital downloads without securing a license. The demand is $150,000 per infringement.

It’s hard to get Busch to comment on his future plans—“I’m a litigator,” is the most he will say. Certainly the word is out about Busch’s big win, though. Last year, Busch was retained by two Illinois music professors and a Texas musician to represent their rights in an alleged infringement of their 1983 song “La Sirena,” which gained unexpected popularity in a digital incarnation by Def Jam Music Group, in a song titled “Dip It Low” by Christina Milian. With his Bridgeport litigation, Richard Busch has climbed out of the footnotes and into the chapter headings for legal scholars. Music executives might want to keep an ear out for him, too.